Monday, 1 May 2017

Examples of Crap I Waste My Money On: Bootsale Report 11

I wasn’t planning to go
bootsailing this week despite being a bank holiday (meaning Dunton and many
other bootsales are on both the Sunday and Monday), we had rubbish weather
predicted and I had no one to go with BUT I couldn’t sleep Saturday night, my
sleep pattern is very often atrocious, so as I was still awake at 6am I decided
to wander down to Collier Row bootsale. I’m sure I’ve gone into this before but
just in case I haven’t: Collier Row Bootsale is my local bootsale that’s about
a four or five minute walk out of town, the reason I very rarely go to it and
instead drive half an hour to Dunton is because Collier Row bootsale is an
utter shithole. Amongst its various problems is 90% of the buyers and about 75%
of the sellers are curmudgeonly arseholes and so after about five lines of
dirty stalls and rude bastards so was I. The benefits of the place come down to
it being nearby, it being small enough to do in an hour and there being a good
chance you’ll see a fight, because of all the curmudgeonly arseholes. I didn’t
see a fight this week – sadness.

How well did I do in terms
of purchases? Terrible. I didn’t even take a haul photo. Buuuut Given that it
only took roughly 75 minutes out of my day and there was little else to do at
6am on a Sunday you could argue that it was in fact worth going - I got some stuff after all, and what I did get
was all pretty decent but yeah, not a great ‘haul’. Still if I do these every
time I have great success it only seems fair to do it when I have little, plus
I want to vent.

The Spy Who
Shagged Me Soundtrack!

50p (65¢)

I’m sure I bought this just
for the utterly tactile CD case, you want a reason that physical copies of
music are still worthwhile in today’s digital age: A pink velvet case with a
prismatic inside and a title that’s one big puffy sticker, so much joy before
you’ve even played the CD. Being the exact right age to find its juvenile
bullshit hilarious I was SO into Austin Powers as in my early teens, I don’t
think the second one has held up as well as the first personally but Heather
Graham is at her most gorgeous and y’know using Willie Nelson as a penis joke
and actually getting Willie Nelson to be in the film to facilitate it? That’s
more than praise worthy. It’s also better than Goldmember but then most
non-fatal diseases are better than Goldmember (I paid to see that, embarrassing).

Heel Macho
Man!

£2 ($2.58)

So that venting then. Mr
Savage here was being sold amongst a pile of about four or five wrestlers on a
tarpauling otherwise filled with mostly worthless broken things and the
nanosecond I bent down to look at them the woman selling them snaps at me
“they’re the original ones”, which is one of a selection of phrases including
‘they’re collectible’ ‘they’re original’ and ‘they’re from the ‘80’s’ (they’re
never from the ‘80s) that, when spoken in such a… direct manner, actually
translates to “I in fact know nothing about these but have convinced myself
they are sought after collectibles so will overcharge and will meet anything
you say or do with nothing but rejection and often hostility” and it pisses me
off, it’s dishonest, rude, arrogant and ignorant at least. How I respond to
this depends on my mood, which having been awake for around 20 hours and having
spent the last half an hour walking ‘round a bootsale filled with pricks was
not the best - “are they.” was all I could ooze out. The woman then stands
directly in front of me, watching me with this intense stony face as I look at
these things, I fucking hate this when it’s just harmless enthusiasm about you
actually taking an interest in their crap but this was flat out hostile, did
she think I was going to steal her precious wrestling treasures? Why kind of
arsehole steals from a place where nothing costs more than a fiver? The sort of
arseholes at Collier Row bootsale I guess.

But I want Macho Man, I
don’t have a WCW era Randy Savage and even though I know it’s not going to be
that fairly priced I’ve decided to buy it, she then does this thing and though
I could point it out to you I couldn’t describe it, but you go to enough
bootsales and the like and you get to notice it; it’s basically changing the
price of the item on the fly from what you originally wanted to something else
because of who’s buying it. Sometimes it’s a good thing, you see people do it
so as to charge significantly less for adorable children for instance and that
warms the tiny piece of charcoal that is my heart but mostly I encounter
another kind, charging you more because you’re an adult interested in something
that is not typically for adults but is considered to be something a niche
group of adults collect. This woman did that, in fact she was leaning towards
adding another quid. It also pisses me off, so she’s three for three, it’s not always done to ‘rip off’ the buyer,
in fact it seems that it’s more often done out a fear that the seller is going
to be ripped off by the buyer but
still irritates me, it’s a horrible attitude and a rather transparent bit of
underhandedness. Wrestling figures are usually about £1 at most because they’re
so irritatingly omnipresent, my offer of 50p less was met with instant, snappy
refusal because ‘they’re the originals’ (this isn’t the original Macho Man
Randy Savage figure by the way, it’s not even the original WCW Macho Man
figure) and thus I was a bit rude. I feel bad about this, oh she’d done enough
to earn a sentence of irritation but a) I said something like ‘you’ve got a
cheek’ which is completely nonsensical as what I mean was more along the lines
of ‘why behave like this?’ and b) I always feel bad when I act like a rotten
human even when I feel it’s justified. Normally I dismissively return the item
to the stall and say something more intelligible (though I have no idea why,
they only snort at it, I could say ‘banana daiquiri please’ and they’d still
react the same) but £2 isn’t horrendous and I wanted change of a tenner (she
gave me the wrong change and did so on purpose because pettiness is the best
answer) so I settled for just being a rude bastard and spent the next two isles
being annoyed at myself that I’d allowed Collier Row Bootsale to infect me.

Buster and
Babs1!

50p (65¢)

Then this seller restored
my faith in bootsale sellers and myself, he was a lovely geezer and I was able
to return to my usual jovial Dunton Bootsale self, he even charged me less than
he originally said for this and the pull along spider to follow for no damn
good reason. Anyway I really wish someone would get the licence and put out a
nice big line of Looney Tunes, Tiny Toons and Animaniacs collector’s figures,
DC Direct did a couple one time but it didn’t go anywhere. The possibilities for
such a line are fantastic – imagine a Daffy Duck with a swappable head where
the beak has been blown around to the other side of his face, imagine all the
Acme™
accessories that could come with Wile E. Coyote, imagine have decent figural
representations (such a posh term) for the Tiny Toons and Animaniacs that
didn’t come from a fast food restaurant (the Good Feathers are the ultimate
pack-in figures, you know it to be true). Anyway you push down on the bunnies
and then it speeds off – goes pretty swift too for a toy that probably cost 1/8th
of a penny to make – it’s from a fairly uncommon set of UK only Burger King
toys from 1994 that maintains a small amount of resale value, Dizzy Devil seems
to be the hardest to find though Plucky Duck’s my favourite, he spits water,
how could he be anything else?

WebClimb!

50p (65¢)

The Kiddicraft Webster line
is amongst my favourites, they are pure nostalgia but also pure charm, a line
of small happy cartoon spiders who spend their days rolling around hexagonal
houses and playing sports while nearly all wearing stylish hats. For me,
finding one at a bootsale is the rough equivalent of a streaker at a football
match but finding one at Collier Row Bootsale, that works, with its hat and
both deelyboppers, is closer to pulling an 18 year old blonde while on holiday.
Hyperbole? Not if you’re that keen on little cartoon spiders in stylish hats,
and I am.

A Highlander,
a Future Mutant and…um…Someone Else!

£2.50 ($3.23) for
all three

The rest of my action figure
scores for the trip. The METAL fellow in black is Ransik from Power Rangers Time Force, also known as
THE BEST POWER RANGERS EVER. Like a lot of the main villains from this time
frame (Mesogog, Lothor, Master Org…) he was only included in a set so while he’s
neither mega rare nor mega expensive he’s still a steal at £1, even if this one
has seen better days; some paint has worn off his shoulder pad and before I took
the Fairy Liquid to him he had all the hallmarks of having been dragged through
a pigsty. The angry ginger fellow isn’t Gambit but Quentin, the main character
from the short lived and underappreciated Highlander:
The Animated Series, I found him amongst the very last few stalls and
couldn’t be happier, though he appeared to have been partly smeared in barbeque
sauce he’s complete with sword and trenchcoat and is the perfect background
figure: their destiny is to stand at the back of my 90’s toy display, you might
never really notice them but you’d certainly notice if they weren’t there, the
Pirates of Black Water thank you Quentin. The lad who mixes sasquatch, karate
master and cyclists though? Him I have no idea about, his size and construction
(I’m so saaaad) is pretty similar to the Chuck Norris Karate Kommandos figures
so I thought he might be one of those – he isn’t. He is as delightfully
ridiculous as those figures though and I’m more than happy to have paid 50p for
the chap, he needs a vaguely ethnic sounding name that unintentionally reveals
the racially stereotyping mindset of 1980s America, I know, I’ll call him Kwang
the Karate Kyclist! That’ll more than do than until I can I.D. him.

And that’s it, not a pleasant
experience but one that delivered unto me Kwang the Karate Kyclist - so it wasn’t all
bad.